Max Gilbert

by Simon Clark

  Chris was sleeping late after a bad night. David was eating breakfast with the others in the gundeck room. Ruth was sharing out cornflakes.

  Shouts from one of the Hodgson boys brought people running to the store room. Mark got there first to find Mrs Lamb hanging. Her face had turned dark, her eyes were open but staring, and she spun like a doll on the end of a string. Mark grabbed her by the waist and lifted her up while Mrs Hodgson cut the string with a penknife.

  They laid her on the stone floor, calling her name and shaking her. She urinated where she lay. Mark gave her mouth-to-mouth.

  This went on for ten minutes. Until Mrs Lamb kicked out her legs. They put her into David's bed in the caravan.

  As Ruth covered her with a blanket she turned her face to the wall. "Why did you bring me back?"

  "Got a bull's-eye, Dad."

  "It's miles from the bull, David."

  "Did."

  "Didn't." Chris pretended to wrestle with his son but it was an excuse to pull him close and hug him tight.

  "Bear-hug!" shouted David breathlessly. "Cheating."

  Christ, he loved his son; he loved his wife. Why had this happened to them? He screwed up his eyes and wished everything normal again. Play-fighting on the beach, picnics, sunshine, working on the sea-fort.

  That morning he'd taken David up into one of the empty sea-fort rooms to play darts. There he'd put on at least a mask of normality. Not that it fitted particularly well after what had happened over the last forty-eight hours. Wainwright's death. Then, last night, the weird procession of drowned men along the beach. Mrs Lamb with the noose. Maybe they would all be better trying what Mrs Lamb ...

  "Da-ad. I can't breathe."

  Chris relaxed his hug.

  "Can I have some sweets, please?"

  Chris looked away from those blue eyes. "As soon as I can get to the shop I'll buy you some."

  "When will that be?"

  "Can I play?"

  To Chris's relief, Ruth joined them. She performed the happy, carefree trick more convincingly than he could.

  They played darts. For a while Chris and Ruth could make David forget that their lives were no longer the same.

  Normality.

  Then came the sound that shattered it.

  "Shhh ..." Chris held up his hand. "What's that?"

  They listened. Reverberating through the sea-fort came the sound of two hard objects being smashed together. Voices and footsteps passed quickly outside.

  "Come on." Chris picked David up.

  "What's wrong, Dad?"

  Ruth said, "It'll be nothing, love. It just sounds like someone knocking at the gate."

  It was.

  Chris made David stay at the bottom of the steps that led up to the walkway. Already Mark and Tony were up there with half a dozen villagers. They craned their heads over the walls to see something at the base of the wall.

  By the time he reached the top he was panting, not from exertion but from tension. Now he dreaded looking out there. Each time seemed worse than the last.

  Standing at the gate was one of the Saf Dar, its body color, even its shape, now altering. The dark cherry-red color and emaciated frame had gone. Now the skin had turned an intense red that made you think of chronic sunburn. But there was still some lingering darkness beneath, as if the blood of the thing was as black as coal.

  Beneath the skin its muscle bulk had grown, making the limbs and torso swollen, with hard knots of muscle bulging at the arms and thighs, forcing veins as thick as ropes to the surface.

  In its left hand it held a pebble as large as a melon. It used this to pound at the oak gates. Each enormous blow sent white splinters of rock flying outward. Now and then a bright blue spark would flash when the rock hit one of the iron gate studs.

  Even though the force of the blow made the stone floor vibrate, it was hard to believe it could actually get through the gates that way. They were built to withstand cannon-balls. Chris leaned over the castellated wall as far as he could, but he couldn't see the gate.

  The thing focused its attention on the gates. It didn't exert itself. The blows were slow, rhythmic.

  Chris found himself counting the beats between each blow.

  Crash-one-two-crash-one-two-crash ...

  The muscular arm would slowly rise, then whip down to smash at the gate at the creature's eye level. It could have been some bastard machine down there. It didn't tire; it didn't get bored; it didn't need a piss. Nothing.

  Perhaps its intention was to unsettle the people inside the sea-fort, rather than to break the doors down. If it was, it had succeeded. The villagers flinched with every cracking blow.

  The pounding went on and on. ...

  After an hour most of the villagers had moved back to the main sea-fort building to try to escape the noise of the hammering.

  "Come on," said Chris to Mark and Tony, "we've got to talk."

  Chris led the two men into the old mess room. Half a dozen straight-backed chairs formed a circle where some of the villagers had sat talking earlier. A bare hundredwatt bulb hanging from the ceiling was the main source of light.

  He still believed that Tony hadn't told him everything. Even if it didn't help a fig, he wanted to be in the picture.

  They sat, Mark with the shotgun across his lap. Chris leaned forward and said: "Tony ... Mark. Two questions: one, why is all this happening? Two, what are we going to do about it?

  Tony and Mark looked at Chris for a moment, the sound of the distant pounding pulsing through the thick stone walls.

  Tony rubbed his jaw. "Now's the time to bare our chests. You're in this with us. And to be honest I'm to blame for it." He began to peel the cellophane from one of his cigars. "When Fox tipped that petrol all over the place I should have put a match to it when I had the chance."

  Chris raised his eyebrows.

  "If I'd done that you wouldn't have been in this bloody awful mess. Fox would have been carted away to the nearest psychiatric hospital. And I'd be behind bars in Munby. At least I'd be far enough away from OutButterwick."

  Mark's voice rumbled softly. "You don't believe that, Tony. The other side of the earth won't be far enough away if they break out."

  "Who are they really?"

  As Chris asked the question, Ruth slipped in through the door and sat beside him.

  Tony shot a look at Mark which said, who's going to talk? You or me?

  Mark nodded back. "You're the one with words, Tony."

  "If you've got time, folks ..." Tony's smile was forced. "Then I'll begin at the beginning." He lit the cigar. "About six months ago a woman bought a large piece of steak. Big as a plate. Anyway, she cuts it in half. Puts one piece in the fridge on a plate. The other half she grills for her dinner. Later that day she begins to feel ill and goes to bed. Her husband comes home from work and she tells him to get the other half of the steak and cook it for his supper. Anyway, he goes to the fridge and opens the door. The piece of steak not only fills the plate, it's hanging over the side, all the way to the bottom of the fridge. When he comes to look at it more closely he sees it's just-it's just moving. Then he notices some raw sausages. It had touched the sausages and somehow infected them so they had split out of their skins and were swelling up to twice their normal size; a piece of bacon he'd left that morning had become as thick as the Bible. Of course he took the steak to the environmental health office. And what do you think it was?"

  Chris and Ruth shrugged.

  "Cancer. The steak had been cut from a cancerous cow. What the man's wife had bought was nothing more than a slice of living cancer."

  "Nice little horror story," said Chris, "but I don't follow."

  Again during the pause they became conscious of the rhythmic pounding and shifted uncomfortably on the chairs.

  "That's just what it is. A modern folk myth that circulates every few years. But I used the idea of the story, the cancer steak infecting the sausages, to illustrate what's happening here. What I'm going to tell you is reall
y about ordinary things being transformed by something extraordinary."

  Tony leaned forward. "Look. Remember at the barbecue I told you that Manshead, the little island here, on which the sea-fort is built, was believed to be one of those special places that lie on the boundary between our ordinary, run-of-the-mill world and the next world, the supernatural world, heaven, Valhalla, Olympus, home of the gods-give it any bloody name you want. You've probably heard the legends about Sri Lanka, that there is a certain mountaintop, so close to the boundary between this world and the next one that if you listen hard enough you can hear the fountains of bleeding paradise. Manshead is one of those places." He spoke in a low, even voice, his glasses flashing hypnotically. "Here on this slab of rock in the sea stands one of those doorways to a world beyond this one. Pagans, mystics, early Christians, even a cynical git like me, Tony Gateman, believes it. This is where, when the times were right, people gathered, carried out their religious rites, and opened the doorway."

  "These were the sacrifices you mentioned? They took place here?"

  "That's right, Ruth. If you strip away the fairy stories surrounding sacrificial rites, the bare essence of the ritual is a commercial transaction with the gods. Nothing more than a trade. The sacrificer was saying, 'Look, I cut the throat of my valuable ox and give it to you, the god I worship. In return, I trust you will give me the power to defeat my enemies, or ensure that our community enjoys an abundant harvest this year.' In all sacrifices it's basically the mortal giving something of value to the god in return for a special wish being granted-good crops, healthy children, a mild winter."

  Chris said, "I remember you said the more precious the thing you gave, the more you would expect in return."

  "True. Big things cost big prices ... An arm and a leg for a fast car, as they say. In times of great need such as famine or invasion they would sacrifice what they valued most-a loved member of the community. Or a member of the community they all love or would love if it was theirs: a child. Or even children."

  Ruth shook her head. "Okay, so it's a way of buying a granted wish from this cosmic shopkeeper, but what on earth is this god going to do with a dead horse or sheep?"

  "That troubled me, Ruth. I ruminated on it for many a long month. But then I put myself in the place of the person making the sacrifice. You have a valuable cow, say. It's important to you; it provides food for your family. What do you actually feel when you kill it? You're basically going to be pissed off. You're giving away something precious which you could have put to damned good use yourself. Or, in a more extreme case, how do you feel when you sacrifice your own child? Cutting your own son's throat. ... Breaking open his head with a stone axe. ..."

  "But why? How does that give this god what it wants?"

  "Ancient people understood what was happening. They weren't being pointlessly savage and cruel when, say, the Aztecs took a warrior to the top of the mountain, used a ceremonial flint knife to cut through his chest-wall to expose the still-beating heart, then yanked it out with their bare hands. Or when the priests would skin a woman and wear the skin like a disguise.

  "Listen, today modern psychiatrists are only beginning to understand what was happening. Catharsis: purification, purging. Catharsis is a way of discharging a buildup of psychic power inside yourself before it begins to damage you or affect how you behave. We've all heard of the woman, say, whose husband has died. Until she cries she can't really come to terms with what has happened. She may become withdrawn and reclusive. But when she cries it's an act of catharsis: the floodgates open and release all that grief that's built up inside her."

  Ruth nodded. "So ancient people understood, although it might have been on an instinctive level, the benefits of catharsis."

  "The Aztecs had a ceremony where they killed a number of their own children. This is a horrible, horrible thing to do. But again they weren't stupid or cruel, or incapable of feeling grief. On the contrary, they would weep and weep and weep. Look, to get to the point about sacrifice, what it actually does is this. One, the Aztecs killed their own children at these rituals. Two, this would make the people weep uncontrollably. Three, this would release a huge rush of unconscious mental energy. You see someone crying, really crying, they weep, cry, sob, shake uncontrollably, they can't walk. This tidal wave of grief cripples them. But you see all the emotion come flooding out. Multiply this by fifty, a hundred, a thousand. It would be like breaking down a great dam between the conscious part of the mind and the unconscious." Tony tapped his temple with a thin finger. "All that worry, fear, hate that had been building up there for year after bloody year come out. And we're talking a real gusher; there's lots of pressure built up there. It's like striking oil."

  There was a pause. The distant pounding of rock against wood continued. Muffled, like a heartbeat. Mark, uneasy, shifted the position of the shotgun across his lap.

  "So this is what the god wants," said Chris. "All this ... emotion. Why?"

  Tony gave a shrug. "Could you explain to a robot why we need to eat? It's something that the god wants. Needs. We probably can't even comprehend what does happen. But I imagine it nourishes itself on this huge emotional discharge after the sacrifice. Somehow it absorbs it, if you like, drinks it telepathically."

  Chris snorted. "Well, you've just put us on the level of cattle. Along comes the supernatural farmer, milks us of emotion, slaps us on the rump, and out we go to pasture again until the next time."

  Mark spoke. "It doesn't sound that pleasant, Chris. But if this thing that is coming through enjoys juicing up on whatever's inside here"-he placed his finger against his head as if it were the barrel of a gun-"then I'm not over-concerned. Because, like a farmer, he gives something back that his herd wants."

  "And that is?"

  "And that is protection from those things out there."

  "But it wasn't always like that."

  "No, Ruth. As I said at the barbecue, this is a healing place. Out-Butterwick draws people to it who are physically or spiritually ill. I was an alcoholic, remember. It draws people to it that suffer from depression, anxiety--people who find everyday life just so plain hard that they can't go on anymore. They came here one by one, and one by one, instinctively, they knew what was going to happen. For the last few years we've known that it was coming-the visitation, if you like. That there would be a burst of some miraculous power through this place. And every one of these men and women would have their own personal wish granted."

  "But it would have to be bought by sacrifice?"

  Tony nodded, the thick lenses flashing beneath the light. "Not that I would do anything as insensitive as enquiring what that would entail. But I'm sure everyone was developing their own personal ritual and choosing something they would give. Although it's highly unlikely anyone was planning a blood sacrifice. You might guess my sacrifice, a cynical old capitalist like me. Money."

  Mark rose from his chair restlessly. It was as if he sensed that time was running out. "And you two fine people will have guessed that all this thing's gone bad. There we were, all waiting for nice miracles. But then those things showed up. And to put it bluntly, they are going to hijack this bit of magic we've all pinned our hopes on. Then ..." He shook his head, his face grim.

  "But who are they?"

  "The Saf Dar? From what I can discover they were a gang of psychopaths, different nationalities-American, British, German, African, Indian-who came together shortly after World War II. Dabbled in piracy, arms smuggling, assassinations; they were mercenaries for whoever paid the right money. Later they specialised in destabilising governments in Third World countries. Simply by doing what they loved: killing. Butchering men, women, children. Hence the name Saf Dar-breaker of the line. In 1961 they were en route for England."